Tag: Canon

Japan’s Canon lifted its full year operating profit forecast after reporting strong first-quarter results on the back of earnings from a medical equipment unit it bought from Toshiba last year.

The camera and printer maker forecast profit of $2.43 billion, up from $2.28 billion estimated in January. It reported profit of $2.05 billion in the previous year

The upbeat outlook suggests Canon’s strategy to diversify has begun to reward the company after the $5.8 billion acquisition of the Toshiba unit and the $2.8 billion takeover of Swedish video-surveillance firm Axis AB.

Canon also said the two existing businesses that have long dragged its earnings down – laser printers and cameras – are also showing signs of bottoming out.

Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Toshizo Tanaka told an earnings briefing that recovery in the Chinese and other emerging economies is pushing up demand for laser printers, while continued popularity of so-called mirrorless cameras is driving camera sales.

Japanese snapper and printer maker Canon has predicted its first full-year operating profit will rise to 11.4 percent, which is its first rise in three years.

The profit is mostly thanks to earnings from a medical equipment unit it bought from Toshiba Corp last year.

The $5.8 billion acquisition of the unit, which makes X-ray scanners and eye examination machines, is part of Canon’s cunning plan to diversify as demand for its cameras, printers and copier machines wanes amid the spread of smartphones and paperless media.

The company forecast operating profit to rise to $2.3 billion this year compared to the last 12 months. This is pretty much what the cocaine nose-jobs of Wall Street predicted.

Fourth-quarter operating profit fell 25.1 percent from a year earlier, hurt after the yen strengthened following Britain’s vote in June to leave the European Union. This was a bit lower than what analysts predicted but since no one really predicted Brexit most people are prepared to give Canon that one.

While it is selling off bits of itself to make up the money lost in accounting scandals Toshiba wants to invest $3.2 billion to build a new semiconductor plant in Japan.

The company is investing in the plant, which will make its proprietary 3D flash chips, over a period of three years till March 2019, it said in a statement Thursday. Toshiba expects output to begin no earlier than 2018.

The outfit has indicated that it wants to grow its chip business even if its appliances and healthcare need to be sold off as soon as possible. Canon has already agreed to buy Toshiba’s medical equipment unit for $5.9 billion

The chip investment will take place over three years, Toshiba said.

It also said separately that it was delaying its planned adoption of international financial reporting standards (IFRS). It still planned to eventually adopt the global standard, it said, but efforts to do so had been held up since last year’s accounting scandal.

Sales of business inkjets showed 16.3 percent growth in the third quarter of 2015, with 2.2 million units shipped.

But while inkjets were a stand out for hardcopy peripherals, the whole sector showed a decline of 6.3 percent, with shipments falling to 25.8 million units, according to data released by IDC.

In the sector,high end colour laser devices churning out 45 pages per minute (PPM) showed 15.3 percent growth in the quarter, compared to the same quarter in 2014.

While most of the top five vendors showed declines in the quarter, Kyocera showed 6.1 percent year on year growth.

The top dog in the hardcopy peripherals market remains HP, with a 38.7 percent market share in the quarter. In second place is Canon (20.5%), then Epson (15.8%), Brother (7.3%) and Samsung (4%). Samsung showed the steepest decline in the quarter, a 21 percent drop.

Back in the 1970s, pundits were predicting that we’d be well into the sphere of the paperless office by the 21st century. Our offices are still stacked with papers and the print market – especially the production print market, appears to be buoyant.

Well, according to a survey from IDC, that’s far from the case. The worldwide production print market grew by 9.9 percent in the third quarter of this year.

Shipment value increased too by 5.9 percent, so the value was over $1.2 billion.

All categories in the production print market grew, with label and packaging up 15 percent and high speed inkjet shipments growing by 8.8 percent in the quarter, compared to the previous quarter. Canon, Ricoh and HP rule the roost in this sector.

The top five vendors in the quarter were Xerox, HP, Ricoh, Konica and Canon.

Amy Chado, research manager at IDC, said: “High speed inkjet experienced a tremendous rebound in the third quarter, with system shipments growing 110 percent from the previous quarter and nine percent annually.”

Japanese imaging giant Canon released its second quarter financial results and said demand for a number of its products fell during the period

In addition, Canon was hit by the disparity in currencies between the dollar, the euro and yen, it said.

In a statement, Canon said that although demand in Japan for interchangeable lens digital cameras remained strong but suffered “sever conditions” in other regions. Sales volumes for digital compact cameras also fell in most regions compared with the same periods of the previous year.

As cameras in smartphones become ever more powerful, there’s a disincentive for people to spend money on separate devices.

Canon said: “Although sales volume declined amid the ongoing contraction of the market due to the effects of the growing popularity of smartphones, profitability improved thanks to the growing ratio of high added value models featuring high image quality and high magnification zoom capabilities.”

Canon’s semiconductor lithography equipment segment grew in its second quarter, and although sales for volume for digital radiography systems fell compared to the same period last year, sales increased year on year.

Net profits for Canon fell to 68 billion yen for the quarter, compared to 81 billion yen in the same period last year.

It is not clear what Perlmutter gets to do once he has handed these parts of the Intel empire over to its new Imperator. Apparently they still have to talk about that.

Mike Bell will head up Intel’s newly formed “new devices” group, which will focus on emerging product trends.

“The new devices organization is responsible for rapidly turning brilliant technical and business model innovations into products that shape and lead markets,” Krzanich said in the email, according to the source.

Hermann Eul, who shared responsibility for Intel’s mobile communications group with Bell will now take over that business completely.

The restructuring flies in the face of what Intel executives have previously said about mobile chips.

For a long time they have been telling us that the company should not focus too much on catching up in smartphones and tablets at the expense of missing out on future trends in mobile.

While Krzanich’s creation of the “new devices” group signals he is also looking beyond today’s mobile toys, the overall restructuring does indicate a sudden focus on mobile.